Photo credit: kris247
Our PD initiative to encourage more technology use with the teachers at our campus is underway. I’m extremely excited and hopeful that our already-busy colleagues will come to the party and take part.
Katie and I have tried to differentiate our approach so that we are catering to the needs of all teachers, be they novices or experts. To this end, we have created challenges each week that they must complete IF they want to be in the draw to win the prizes. We put together a cheeky little teaser to appeal to their more materialistic senses…
We have decided to use both a blog and a wiki to share the info and tasks with everyone. The blog is more a summary of where we’re wanting people to head for the purposes of this PD initiative, whereas the wiki is a place for information about all sorts of things related to Web 2.0 tools and the like. We hope to be able to extend and refer to the wiki for any future endeavours with technology PD, and also hope it provides a point of reference for the teachers we are working with.
We have 4 challenge levels that the teachers can choose from — novice, apprentice, practitioner & expert — and people are welcome to mix them up depending on the task, e.g. one week they might do the novice challenge, the next they might do the practitioner.
While we have the blog and the wiki for independent learning, we are also making ourselves available for ‘Fruity Fridays’ — a chance to meet with us face-to-face to get some support in completing the tasks, while sharing some cut fruit for breakfast. We hope the ‘personal touch’ will encourage those people who prefer to learn in group situations with a person available to assist should they need it.
I should mention that this is entirely optional. We are not requiring people to do it. We are hoping to reach a critical mass that will help shift to a more technology-aware and savvy staff.
Below are some of the results of our survey, which proved to be extremely interesting and useful to us in developing PD.
What’s great about the results (above) is that it we think it is going to be really easy to make a positive difference for our colleagues. I mean, if all they get out of it is an introduction to social bookmarking and voicethreads, then that will provide them with numerous possibilities for their classrooms. I will consider it a job well done if we manage that much! In the words of a good friend and colleague, anything else is just gravy!
What’s challenging for us is to create engaging and motivating tasks for the teachers on top of our regular teaching load! If only there were more hours in the day!
Tip of the Iceberg 